Diamond-Cut Life

by Alison Wiley
My diamond-cut household’s monthly electricity use is about half the national average. Besides saving more than $450/year, we’re lowering our carbon footprint because even here in Oregon, coal-burning fuels about 36% of our electricity. And our house is happy, not deprived (diamond-cut = chiseling our consumption down to the core of happiness).

Work [...]

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Yesterday morning I was working at home here in Portland, looking out my living-room window at the cool, misty day. I needed to go down to Metro, just over four miles away, for an afternoon-long meeting.
Like most all people in a city, I had a choice-point: how did I want to transport myself from here [...]

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The New York Times reports this morning  that stocks have now plummeted so far that they reached their permissible limits, and that data on the world’s (not just the U.S. ) economy is pointing to a profound slowdown.
Most agree that big changes are ahead. I assume the fabric of our lives will change a lot, [...]

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Brrr . . . . we’re suddenly needing to run the heat in the morning, so it’s definitely autumn here in Portland, Oregon. We just filled our oil tank for the winter with biodiesel, B20 this time, from Star Oil, who bought it from SeQuential Biofuel.
This will be the second winter we’ll have been [...]

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Paul Krugman is my inspiration today with his editorial on what should be done about the current economic crisis. Mr. Krugman, who I had the pleasure of meeting here in Portland last year, is calling for a highly responsible, specifically “adult” crafting of a bailout. I embrace his analogy between good political leadership and [...]

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Do you suffer from time poverty, i.e. feel that you don’t have nearly enough time? I periodically do, and I’ve seen it termed an American epidemic. The irony and the good news is that many of what I call the over-activities eating up our time and stressing us are the same over-activities that are eating [...]

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I’ve written in recent months about how a low-car diet and a low-TV diet can help us with our national obesity problem and also our carbon obesity (a new phrase I just coined).  I practice both these diets. The new diet I’ll add to the mix today is an advertising diet: limiting our exposure to [...]

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A major predictor of a person’s happiness is the number and quality of relationships in that person’s life. And money can be a make or break in any type of relationship — marital, parent-child, friend-to-friend, dating and courtship, roommates and housemates.
I believe that when we put relationships and integrity first, money and healthy finances [...]

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The way we drive has a huge impact on our fuel consumption. The cool thing about saving money on gas by using less of it, from the diamond-cut perspective, is that we reduce our carbon emissions at the same time. And all of us would prefer to subsidize our own bank accounts rather than the [...]

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My carpool-pals don’t just help me save gas money and carbon emissions, they also pass good information on to me. Thanks to my baseball-loving ‘pool, I’ve learned about Andrew Brown, the relief pitcher for the Oakland Athletics who uses his bicycle and BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to get to the ballpark for [...]

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